Southwestern Historical Quarterly

Gangs of the El Paso–Juárez Borderland is a welcome addition to the growing catalogue of interdisciplinary books focusing on America's ethnic street gangs. Most prior studies on this topic lacked historical research methods, focusing instead on the "fundamental causes and interpersonal consequences of gang membership" (117). Tapia instead provides a broad overview of the historical, organizational, and subcultural elements of the century-old Chicano gang experience in the United States.

It is no accident that he focuses on the closely linked cities of El Paso and Juárez. El Paso has the oldest barrio gang history in the United States and is the "birthplace of the zoot suit pachuco and most things Chicano [End Page 365] gang related" (72). Moreover, no other pair of border cities exhibits "the scope of cultural and practical exchange" (77) that exists between these two. Any comparison of them brings up the glaring disparity of violent crime rates in each, as El Paso consistently appears on lists of safest cities in the United States, and Juárez retains some of the highest murder rates in the world. As far as the widely feared bleed-over of violence from Juárez to El Paso, Tapia borrows a modern-day trope brandished by El Paso's "non-gang, non-cartel involved Chicanos," that "what happens in Juárez stays in Juárez" (79).

The book is composed of six chapters and two appendices listing historical street gangs from both cities. In the first chapter, Tapia offers a brief history of the region's gangs between 1915 and the 1960s. The author's use of oral histories and newspaper archives adds color to his documentation of changing trends in barrio gangs. Chapter 2 focuses on Las Cruces, New Mexico, and details the strong influence of California's street gangs while acknowledging the "most proximate and obvious gang influences coming from El Paso-Juárez" (36). While most of the chapters focus on larger urban areas, chapter 3 chronicles gang activity in the rural environs of Anthony, New Mexico, examining the gang influences and network linkages in a much smaller city.

Chapter 4 chronicles the gang continuum in Ciudad Juárez over the decades. Tapia makes a good case that one cannot measure the gang scene in far West Texas and southern New Mexico without accounting for Ciudad Juárez and its influence on those communities. Chapter 5 covers El Paso's modern gangs and the emergence of the largest of them, Barrio Azteca (BA), in recent years, including its birth in the Texas prison system and its proximity to Juárez, which allowed the gang to flourish in the Mexican underworld very quickly.

The final chapter discusses the influence of history and geography on criminal subcultures in the borderlands and offers a valuable overview that brings the discussion of borderlands into the present. This reviewer was pleased to find Tapia's nuanced discussion of the how the number '13' (for M, the 13th letter of alphabet) has been used to exaggerate a gang's sophistication and inherent danger and its affiliation with the Mexican Mafia (MM) and California's southern gangs, or Sureños.

Each chapter is filled with gang names, and to prevent confusion, there is an appendix listing the historical street gang inventory of El Paso and Juárez. Rare photographs help bring these gangs to life over the years. Moreover, the author's use of the oral histories housed at the University of Texas at El Paso illuminates the modern history of gangs on the borderlands, rich as they are in first person accounts. This book will be of particular interest to sociologists, criminologists, historians of Texas gangs and crime, and the general reader. The author's fluid writing style and his meshing of the disciplines of criminology and history makes it a must-read [End Page 366] for anyong who wants to understand the broader dynamics of...